Microsoft’s OEMs focus on Windows 8, but the future is Surface

Tom Warren: “While Intel is trying to keep the Windows tree healthy, Microsoft is hoping that the leaves don’t start to drop off before its own family of Surface devices are fully ready. Redmond isn’t ‘priming the pump’ here, it’s planting seeds for the future. If Microsoft is successful then it could be the world’s biggest Windows OEM in just a few years. The future is Surface.” You just have to look at the difference in build quality and supplied software between OEM devices and Surface even though Surface is cheaper to realise that the age of Windows OEMs is coming to an end. The writing’s on the wall, and the OEMs know it: there’s no future for them in Windows.

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So does this mean that the only safe option for OEMs is to “add value” to stuff that won’t get taken away from them, and from which they are free from extortionate licensing and crippling terms and conditions…. open source?

2013 is the year of the open source OEM?

I’ve already heard that OEMs are finding even Android too painful and are looking at even more libre platforms.

It seems unlikely, but there may not be any alternative. It’s not like they can jump into bed with apple, and android is still lacking for desktop tasks, so just maybe that number 3 player will grow a little.

But if the OEM likes to bet on the current number one then Android is it and only Android. At least it gives them way more options to build something up on, expand into growing or set on new markets. A future.

I was referring to there being no alternative to going the Linux route, if MS is going to shun them.

Those other OSes you mentioned are mobile; nobody would use them as desktops, and there are still going to be people using desktops and laptops for quite some time, as mobile interfaces are gimped for real work.

That being said, things like Photoshop mean they may just have to bend over for MS, as the only OS they can install which supports that sort of thing is windows.

All those OS’s I named are made to run on a range of devices. By NO means are they mobile only. Tizen and BB target for example cars too, JollaMobile’s sailfish and Ubuntu home-entertainment like TV’s. All of them target small (phone), medium (phablet) and large screen (10″ tablets, laptops).

Todays large screen tablets are like laptops/desktops. Screen-resolution and external input-devices. Ironical Surface Tablets demonstrate where we are heading too. Desktop, Laptop, Tablet. The border is blur.

The only limiting factor on that are our large hands and bad eyes. Virtual keyboards with force feedback and in-eye projection like google glasses. May they come to the mass-market soon.

So does this mean that the only safe option for OEMs is to “add value” to stuff that won’t get taken away from them, and from which they are free from extortionate licensing and crippling terms and conditions…. open source?

Nah, they’ll probably get sued for patent violations and have to pay an extortion fee to companies like Microsoft, just like HTC does with their Android devices.

They would need a common ground in order to have something for major developers to target.

If there was no commonality, and easy means of installation regardless of vendor, they would never swap from Windows.

Android or Ubuntu are the only choices which will allow them to have a nice, common platform with a large existing userbase, and an easy experience.

Mind you, they would all obviously ship their own DEs based on theming existing DEs, but so long as it was Ubuntu LTS at the core, with the software centre, it would mean ease of installation and configuration.

I would just nuke whatever “Linux” they preload and install whatever distribution I want anyway, so the fact that I wouldn’t be paying a Windows tax upfront would be a good enough advantage for me. That’s the whole point of a “general purpose” computer after all, isn’t it? That it can be programmed and configured to work as you see fit?

And choice is not bad… do you really get pissed when you walk down the cereal aisle in your local supermarket and see countless brands and types of cereal to choose from, often imitations of each other with seemingly nothing different other than the price tag? Do you really wish every car at a car dealership was just a black Model T so you didn’t have to worry about pesky differences like comfort, features, power, and fuel efficiency? Would we really be better off if the only beers in the world were the “Light” flavorless variants of Bud, Miller and Coors, with all those traditional styles and delicious craft beers forced off the shelves and their brewers forced out of business?

I would just nuke whatever “Linux” they preload and install whatever distribution I want anyway, so the fact that I wouldn’t be paying a Windows tax upfront would be a good enough advantage for me. That’s the whole point of a “general purpose” computer after all, isn’t it? That it can be programmed and configured to work as you see fit?

The normal “joe” and “jane” users are not like you, so they just use what is already there. This was one of the reasons these dummbed down Linuxes sold so bad. Even their own repositories were almost empty.

As for installing your favorite Linux distribution, good luck in some of those systems. If the netbook is not a famous one, not even the usual guys care about reverse engineering some of their parts.

And choice is not bad… do you really get pissed when you walk down the cereal aisle in your local supermarket and see countless brands and types of cereal to choose from, often imitations of each other with seemingly nothing different other than the price tag? Do you really wish every car at a car dealership was just a black Model T so you didn’t have to worry about pesky differences like comfort, features, power, and fuel efficiency? Would we really be better off if the only beers in the world were the “Light” flavorless variants of Bud, Miller and Coors, with all those traditional styles and delicious craft beers forced off the shelves and their brewers forced out of business?

Choice is good, but when it is too much it has the reserve effect.

Psychology studies confirm that the stress of a given individual increases as the amount of choices is available to him/her in a given moment.

The choice some people always like to brag about in Linux distributions already happened once, the survivors like myself know it as UNIX wars. It almost killed portability across UNIX systems.

The normal “joe” and “jane” users are not like you, so they just use what is already there. This was one of the reasons these dummbed down Linuxes sold so bad. Even their own repositories were almost empty.

Ah, so it’s no different than the way it has been for decades then. People just chose whatever was given to them–Windows–and were done with it. And small repositories? Come on! The masses have gone without any concept of a repository whatsoever because that word is not a part of DOS/Windows vocabulary.

As for installing your favorite Linux distribution, good luck in some of those systems. If the netbook is not a famous one, not even the usual guys care about reverse engineering some of their parts.

You know, then, what kind of hardware I will actively ignore as if it’s a cheap plastic case of syphilis.

Choice is good, but when it is too much it has the reserve effect.

This just in: Hâ‚‚O has a toxic level. Dry ice is so cold it can cause frostbite. Fire is so hot it can cause burns and destroy shit. Extremely warm weather increases the chance of heat stroke. Too much sunlight can cause sunburn.

Psychology studies confirm that the stress of a given individual increases as the amount of choices is available to him/her in a given moment.

And? You want to limit the market because of that? Hint: Probably virtually everything in real life causes stress. It is unavoidable. Deal with it. And if that means avoiding all the choices and just picking something in your price range, then no one going to stop you. In the end, you are buying a product that was built to just work… no one is telling you to look into every single aspect of what makes those machines unique until your head explodes.

If you limit based on price alone, chances are you will drastically lower the number of possibilities from that alone. If you really can’t decide on your own, that’s what the customer service and salesmen are paid to do. If you haven’t learned the basics of handling money, shopping and product research, then maybe you shouldn’t be at a store by yourself in the first place.

Actually I wouldn’t be surprised if just like Vista the OEMs pull a “gang of nine” and demand (and get) the right to sell Win 7 and Ballmer will end up being told by the board around Xmas of this year to “pursue other interests”. because its either that or the OEMs start building ChromeBooks and ChromeTops and MSFT will be the company people talk about needing to close their doors and give the money back to the shareholders.

Ironically all those that cheered Google and Open Source are about to get a RUDE awakening, because the future is NOT tablets, its game consoles. What do I mean by that? Black boxes, machines that boot from a locked BIOS to a locked OS that gets corporate approved apps from a corporate owned appstore and when no longer supported by corporate can be thrown in the tash because like a game console you won’t be able to really do anything else with it unless you are handy with a soldering iron.

Anybody look at the new ChromeBooks? Can’t run Debian, or Vector, or Red hat, or Slax, even though we are talking a Celeron dual, hard drive, bog standard laptop parts, why? Because Google has locked down the UEFI, just like MSFT! Now the ONLY thing you can run other than corp approved ChromeOS is to jump through a couple of pages of CLI and do a LOT of finger crossing (because there is a chance that by even attempting this you’ll void your warranty as you have to completely wipe the drive just to get it to work) and at the end of that you can run ONE, just one, hacked UEFI version of Ubuntu, which probably won’t be supported for anything other than a limited time because its literally being made by one guy.

So sorry about the length, but looking into the future its sadly looking like a corporate wet dream, a future made of suck and fail. Everyone is cheering the big bad MSFT finally dying without noticing that what is coming to replace them? Even worse! At least with Windows on X86 it was easy to run whatever downloaded from anywhere or just wipe the thing and slap any BSD or Linux you wanted, thanks to the iSheep making Apple the richest corp on the planet ALL the new devices are gonna be game consoles, because “hey that’s what folks want, look at Apple!”. Better hang onto your old gear, and buy yourself the most powerful deaktop and laptop you can afford, because i truly believe we are in the last gasps of the golden age of open hardware. What we are gonna get next is game consoles all the way down, from the desktop to the tablet to the cellphone, its all gonna be locked down black boxes you throw away every 2 years when the corp drops support.

Yeah and as somebody old enough to remember those days (My first PC was a VIC 20, my parents got it because it was endorsed by The Shat) I can tell you those days SUUUUCCCCKKKKEEEED with a capital S! NOTHING worked together, NOTHING could be upgraded, and it ALL ended up in the trash when corporate moved to “the next new thing” because you quickly wouldn’t get any software or hardware for the thing.

Again its just like a game console and ruins what for me was the big reason to choose PCs over consoles, the fact you could use them for other things when its gaming years were done. heck my very FIRST gaming PC is STILL GOING, it was a 60MHz 486SX I believe and its being used as a C&C for an ancient lathe at a local lumber mill. Talked to the guy that owns the place a year ago, he says that old thing still purrs like a kitten, runs the lathe 6 days a week. man they don’t make ’em like that anymore.

Anybody look at the new ChromeBooks? Can’t run Debian, or Vector, or Red hat, or Slax, even though we are talking a Celeron dual, hard drive, bog standard laptop parts, why? Because Google has locked down the UEFI, just like MSFT!

Google doesn’t use UEFI.

They use coreboot on their Intel based devices and uboot on their ARM based device – and looking at moving to coreboot there as well (see coreboot repository: http://review.coreboot.org)

The default is a no-pain system that allows Google to push updates while having a way to recover even from broken firmware updates. That one is signed-and-everything.

Then there’s the developer switch, with which certain boot options change: signature checks are gone, graphics are initialized earlier (making it easier to boot non-ChromeOS), …

Yes, that’s not your typical open box, but Google did exactly the right thing: They provide a hardware based user override. From there, it’s a bunch of steps to get your own system on there (since they customize the boot process to their liking), but it’s Google employees writing these documents detailling the CLI commands (oh the horror!), and they even support external hackers trying to run other systems.

Will they continue to do that should ChromeBo{xes,ooks} ever gain dominance on the market? My magic 8-ball is as good on that as yours. Right now it’s hard to blame them for not being open.

Yep and look at the guy above you defending Google like a battered wife “Its okay, he was just angry with me”…sigh. I’m really starting to wonder if the future is gonna be Rollerball, a handful of “supermegacorps” that the people worship and treat like fricking ballclubs that they rally around.

I think you would be hard pressed to find ANYBODY that is a big name in FOSS, not Doctorow,nor Raymond, nor RMS, nor Torvalds that would call what Google is doing any different than what MSFT is doing, sure there is a “dev mode” but they make it so damned much hoop jumping and BS that you can’t even run a bog standard Linux on bog standard hardware!

Again you want MSFT gone? Fine, personally I’d rather see Ballmer fired and a more open company ala IBM take its place, but whatever. but do NOT cheer when somebody comes along and treats you WORSE than the last guy did! At least with WinBoxes you could take any CD and in under 5 minutes be on your way to installing any OS you felt like. if they all jump on the Google way of doing things its like I said, consoles all the way down and it STINKS. Google “does no evil” my southern behind.

Will anyone feel sorry for the OEMs? Pretty much all of them are still or have been in the past guilty or making boring plastic machines pre-installed with crapware. Meanwhile they’ve all been building android tablets. And some like HP with webos have even threatened to completely replace Windows. And lets not forget the Chromebooks also eating into microsofts business.

Will anyone feel sorry for the OEMs? Pretty much all of them are still or have been in the past guilty or making boring plastic machines pre-installed with crapware. Meanwhile they’ve all been building android tablets. And some like HP with webos have even threatened to completely replace Windows. And lets not forget the Chromebooks also eating into microsofts business.

Microsoft must be thinking with friends like these who need enemies!

Yeah, because Microsoft has always treated its OEMs so well.

Microsoft is hardly the victim here. Did you ever stop to wonder why these OEMs install crapware? It’s because Microsoft’s outrageous licensing fees for what should be a commodity are destroying their margins. These OEMs already have razor thin margins without having to add ludicrous software licensing fees on top of that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting Microsoft is the victim here if anything it’s the consumer who has suffered. Margins may be thin but OEMs have done this to themselves, while they’ve been in a race with each other to the bottom Apple has shown that there actually is a market for premium computers.

Microsoft is hardly the victim here. Did you ever stop to wonder why these OEMs install crapware? It’s because Microsoft’s outrageous licensing fees for what should be a commodity are destroying their margins. These OEMs already have razor thin margins without having to add ludicrous software licensing fees on top of that.

That’s not how economics works in a competitive marketplace.

The price of Windows is irrelevant to the OEM — so long as Microsoft charges the same price to every OEM. Because of the antitrust settlements, all the large OEMs pay the same amount for Windows, as Microsoft is prohibited from offering any discounts except for volume discounts.

If the price of Windows went to zero, then the cost of the laptop would drop by around $60, the volume price of Windows Home Premium for large OEMs. However, the OEMs do not get to keep this $60 for long, in a competitive marketplace. The price of the laptop would quickly get driven down by $60, as PCs are commoditized and largely substitutable for one another.

The OEMs would then end up making the same profit on less revenues. They’ll see a slight improvement to working capital, but it will be otherwise ineffectual at lifting them from the pitiful margins they currently earn. In fact, CTO manufacturers like Dell would actually see slightly reduced margins if the OS became free. Dell is famous for holding negative inventory, and thus they would lose the float on the price of the Windows license.

This competitive dynamic is precisely the one that has already played out in the Android phone market. The OS is free — and of course, Google shares part of the search revenues with the OEMs. Yet the Android marketplace is a bloodbath for every OEM except Samsung.

—

Incidentally, the same goes for Intel as for Microsoft. The price of the chip is irrelevant, so long as Intel does not practice favoritism among the OEMs.

One day, business-school students will study the PC OEM business like they currently study the American airline industry — as an example of a super-competitive marketplace in which practically nobody (*) makes money. We haven’t really seen major bankruptcies yet — but we will.

If the price of Windows went to zero, then the cost of the laptop would drop by around $60, the volume price of Windows Home Premium for large OEMs. However, the OEMs do not get to keep this $60 for long, in a competitive marketplace. The price of the laptop would quickly get driven down by $60, as PCs are commoditized and largely substitutable for one another.

The irony here is that the OEMs are also at fault for this race to the bottom. They have actually relied on the fact that Windows was dominant to sell their hardware.

Everyone common man/women knows about iMac, Mac Pro, but can you ask the same about Dell or HP. These companies are positioned themselves and designed their products so that the only differentiator is price.

You are right and I would just add that MSFT is also guilty of killing one of the more interesting form factors along with their good buddy Intel, I’m of course speaking about netbooks. The original netbook ran a Celeron and a small SSD and was very cool, I was lucky enough to get one of the 12 inch AMD netbooks and the E350 means I can play Portal and L4D and even run full Linux VMs on a machine that barely weighs 2.5 pounds and fits under my truck seat, holds 8GB of RAM and oh yeah only costs $350 USD at release. Great unit that purrs even after 3 years.

So what happened? MSFT raised the price of Windows to the OEMs to get rid of the market, Ballmer decided that Windows is “upscale” and shouldn’t be sold on cheap devices so it went from $15 for XP Home to $30 for Vista Basic to $45! For Win 7 Basic and you’ll notice there is no Win 8 Basic, the lowest tier is rumor has it $65 a copy to OEMs now. And of course Intel managed to get away with another frankly illegal move by killing the Nvidia chipset business and by doing so made the Atom chip completely worthless, as without ION to boost its video performance its a total dog. But of course Intel doesn’t want you buying Atom, it wants you to buy Ultrabooks. Ironically thanks to their good buddy MSFT putting out WinME the second coming they have warehouses full of chips because the ultrabooks aren’t selling.

So if the board at MSFT don’t put down the crack pipe and fire Ballmer I could see the OEMs bailing, after Ballmer announced they were getting into the X86 hardware biz and that his goal is to sell MSFT hardware with MSFT software at MSFT stores (where have I heard this before?/munches on Apple/) they really have no choice, its get away from Windows or die.

Dell got burnt by Ubuntu, they have to pay an entire dev team to support their own (badly out of date) fork of Ubuntu because if they use bog standard Ubuntu the drivers break. What we need is one of the companies to embrace and fund one of the BSDs which has a stable driver API so this kind of Mickey Mouse breakage doesn’t occur, otherwise all the OEMs are gonna have to get together and just fork Linux away from Torvalds.

Wouldn’t help, over the last 2 years no fewer than 3 different Intel chipsets have been broken horribly by mainline and had to be fixed by Intel which sometimes took weeks.

Its time for everyone to get together and tell Torvalds to STFU or step down, whichever he wants to do. Quick what do BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS,ChromeOS and Android have that Linux DON’T? A stable driver ABI so changes to the kernel don’t crap on the drivers. Linux is the ONLY one that has such silliniess as programs and even patches “requires kernel x.xx” because of the frankly broken way Torvalds has instituted the thing. Now is anybody gonna argue with a straight face that Linus is smarter than ALL of those OS designers put together?

Lets call a spade a spade, its politics. Linus LIKES having God like control thanks to the way things are set up and if there was a stable ABI he’d be just one more link in the chain and he don’t like that. And don’t trot out the “ZOMFG they might…gasp…have NON FREE drivers sob!” because guess what? There already ARE non free drivers, and they usually work BETTER than what Torvalds and friends approve, see how Nvidia is THE card to use in Linux for example.

If Linux is EVER gonna get out of last place either the community needs to rally around getting Torvalds taken out of the big chair for somebody that will listen to reason or there needs to be a forking AWAY from Torvalds so that a stable ABI can be implemented. Isn’t that what is supposed to be great about FOSS? You can fork away from damage?

Well this is major damage, its being done for political reasons (in fact the ONLY article anybody can produce by a kernel dev in support of the current situation includes the line “and I hope all non free drivers break!” which proves beyond a reasonable doubt its a political NOT a design choice) and it needs to go. When the entire planet is doing it one way and having it work just fine and you chose another and having Mickey Mouse breakage its time to take a good look in the mirror and think. Its this kind of crud that keeps Linux in last place, it ain’t the DEs, it ain’t the software, its the fact that NO retailer can sell your product installed and not run the risk of having half his sales come back broken on first update. That kind of crap went out with XP on the MSFT side, OSX on the Apple side, yet here it is 2013 and it still happens on the Linux side, that is truly sad.

MS is probably counting on the OEMs current total dependence on them to be crippling (due to the monopoly system the OEMs helped set up in the 90’s). Almost all OEMs have no ability to do anything on the software side and currently rely on crapware layers to make their money after the MS tax.

MS sort of gets it, the only way for them to survive the commoditization wars is to commodotize part of the system itself.

Unless there are other very ugly terms going with ChromeOS it seems like a logical migration path for the OEMs to try.

MS is probably counting on the OEMs current total dependence on them to be crippling (due to the monopoly system the OEMs helped set up in the 90’s). Almost all OEMs have no ability to do anything on the software side and currently rely on crapware layers to make their money after the MS tax.

MS sort of gets it, the only way for them to survive the commoditization wars is to commodotize part of the system itself.

Unless there are other very ugly terms going with ChromeOS it seems like a logical migration path for the OEMs to try.

I think the MS tax things is pretty mythical these days. I’ve popped in to many computer shops and what i see is:

* section for apple

* section for android tablets + chrome book (linux)

* section for windows laptop + desktops

In short Microsoft does not have a monopoly on personal computing, and most of the big OEMs are shipping Windows and Android (Linux) computers/tablets.

Well, there last stand, the desktop market, is heavy under fire. In all new markets, the heavily growing ones, they failed. A rounding-error market share. Not dominant, not competitive.

I doubt a company like Microsoft is able to survive for long without there dominant position, without there ecosystem lockin. They may not die but they may end as niche offer like HPUX or Solaris. That may work well in profitable business areas but as company focused on the mass consumer market its rather fatal. More so taken the decades into account Microsoft did not had to compete.

Microsoft needs to shrink fast to stay profitable. Close expensive failures like Bing and WP. Bring there profitable businesses like Office to Android and iOS, open up to become actractive for investment again.

Microsoft trying to shift from a commodity software vendor to a hardware oriented company would be almost as profoundly stupid a form of corporate seppuku as Apple taking a giant hit off the bong and deciding to drop it’s hardware business and focus on selling OS X. The only thing it’ll accomplish is pushing them further towards eventual marginalization and irrelevance as the OEMs find a new horse to run.

Start by asking the State of Washington what it’d do to their economy. Then the rest of the world where MS operates. Then ask any IT person with a brain what having to deal with a potential platform migration would mean cost wise. Then, when you’re done ask anyone old enough to remember the x86 computer world what a colossal pain in the ass “choice” can be.

Adapt or die? Seriously, most people here want a free market, the only way to get that is for Microsoft to come crashing down.

Any software company worth it’s salt would make their software OS agnostic, any company that can’t justify the cost of updating their legacyware that requires Windows can just never connect it to the internet again and use it just as some companies still use ancient mainframe systems running ancient software just because they can’t be bothered to do a port or rewrite.

Very few would make their software OS agnostic, aside from the ones who go web based, because there’s very little if any profit in it. The IT world in general would just find a new vendor to standardize on and the lesser players would go right back to being completely ignored.

There wouldn’t be much in the way of consequences. MS going out of business right now, would mean it’s assets would be bought by another player and Windows/Office would continue to be made.

Maybe the sudden shock of seeing a computing behemoth falter and wither away would motivate the market to diversify and make software multiplatform and less susceptible to the cycles of whatever third party.

It will be interesting to see what Intel does in this situation. Microsoft could become Apple like and be the only one selling Windows in the future, but that means that Intel will lose a lot of business as OEM’s move to selling ARM based Android devices etc to make up for lost Windows sales.

In that case will Intel then support another OS (Some form or Linux or something) to make up for the lost Windows sales etc?

I think the next 5 years will tell the new direction of the computer industry. As MS Office becomes more and more irrelevant there will no compelling reason to HAVE to use Windows. Windows will of course stay popular, its what a billion people know, but it wont be the only choice anymore.

You can already see what they are doing. Intel is desperately trying to get into the smartphone business.

Intel’s initial plans to become big in mobile went poof when Nokia dumped Meego and went for Microsoft. Now they are trying again with Samsung and Tizen, and their developers have to suck down a lot of abuse for it.

Intel’s initial plans to become big in mobile went poof when Nokia dumped Meego and went for Microsoft. Now they are trying again with Samsung and Tizen, and their developers have to suck down a lot of abuse for it.